THE writer
of this piece in The Daily Express on 17.5.2000 is Express columnist
and Woman's Hour presenter Jenni Murray, a friend of former Women's
Hour editor and now Dean of the Media School, LCP, Sally Feldman.
Ms Murray is clearly in need of some lessons in academic freedom herself.
Universities don't have bosses – they aren't private companies.
They have administrators and managers, who are bound by law to respect
the right of academic staff "to question and test received wisdom and
to put forward new ideas and controversial or unpopular opinions without
placing themselves in jeopardy of losing their jobs".
Moreover, according to the Nolan Committee, it is not possible to detach
the tradition of academic freedom from the management of the institution
without damaging academic standards and administrative propriety: "the
two are linked, and it is significant that secretive decision-making
processes seem to have been a common feature on those occasions when
things went awry."
Yet the 'reluctant lecturer', Michael Chanan, a scholar of international
standing, has been scapegoated and removed from his teaching as a result
of his criticisms of management.
Ms Murray also gets the story wrong. It wasn't Hitchcock the students
objected to, but the fact that they were asked to spend a whole term
looking at one director, and the teaching organised by the new course
leader was pitched at too low a level. And it wasn't dissident lecturers
who claimed that the changes brought a "decisive lurch towards
classical mainstream Hollywood" which showed a "severe lack
of cultural diversity", but the students themselves who said this.
Unlike Ms Murray, they know, for example, how many "lesser known" world
cinema directors were represented at this year's Cannes Film Festival,
including no less than five Latin Americans as well as directors from
Tunisia, Iran, Korea and China.
It is not the dissident lecturers who are behind the times but Ms.Murray
and her friends. They are just not living in the same vibrant multicultural
film world as the students. Even the hard headed management Ms Murray
extols is out of date, especially the Birtian kind, which John Birt's
successor at the BBC, Gregg Dyke, has repudiated. According to Dyke,
Birt's regime was characterised by a "climate of fear" as well as too
much management jargon and bureaucracy, yet this is the style of management
which the Dean brought to the college when she transferred from the
BBC two and a half years ago.
Perhaps the most distasteful aspect of Ms Murray's piece is her condescension
towards students. She writes that the episode "seems an example
of the outmoded loony ideology of the Seventies that's left so many
young people knowing everything about obscure Caribbean poets and nothing
about Shakespeare and Milton." It's one thing to defend Shakespeare
and Milton, but the implication that a figure like the Nobel laureate
Derek Walcott is to be classed as "an obscure Caribbean poet"
is a blatant example of cultural arrogance and an insult to students
who come from or have attachments to Africa, the Caribbean, Latin America
and other places on the map of world cinema, of whom there are quite
a number since the course has an international reputation. One of the
reasons for this reputation is that until now the aim has been precisely
not to privilege Hollywood, or anywhere else, which also attracts home
students who come on the course to learn - among many other things -
about these other film-makers, whose work can hardly be seen because,
like Jenni Murray, the distributors seem bent on keeping the lesser-known
aspects of world cinema lesser known.
As for Ms Murray, as she goes to give her lectures, she should ponder
her own headline: 'Let the things we teach reflect the real world'.
Council for Academic Freedom and Academic Standards, 25 May 2000
